Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Cross Post due to technical component - Thanks for all the fish

[A. Wilcox]

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On 09/12/16 23:46, Christopher Head wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Dec 2016 12:15:06 -0500 james <garftd@×××××××.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Gentoo-proper is has too much political baggage to encourage
>> folks to innovate, imho. So, I really hope the gentoo dev
>> community gets behind the Anna Wilcox idea of streamlining Gentoo
>> into the most fork-able distro on the planet. WE could all be one
>> happy family and yet be very competitive with our ideas, trials
>> and published results?  Surely a few eggheads
>> (academcis/pedantics) see the wisdom of competing micro_distros?
>> Then there can be peace and harmony as everybody can do exactly
>> as they please with their little cluster of gentoo and their very
>> own portage-tree. And then folks running gentoo-proper now can
>> pick and choose which innovations they want to include in the
>> master tree.
>
> As an ordinary user, this sounds pretty bad. Forking is great for
> developers, but bad for users. I don’t *want* 27 different
> Gentoo-derived fork distributions, each of which is great at one
> thing. I don’t want to have to reinstall a different OS just
> because I switch from writing embedded code to running Octave.
> Honestly, I don’t even want to go out and find other OS’s repos,
> add them as overlays, and hope the inter-OS dependencies work.


I think James has perhaps spoken ambiguously, or at least I hope that
you have misunderstood his proposal.  (If you haven't, then he's
misunderstood mine.)

The point of making it easier to fork is not only for the benefit of
developers.  As James says:

> And then folks running gentoo-proper now can pick and choose which
> innovations they want to include in the master tree.

The idea being the people who "run" Gentoo, that being the developers
of Gentoo, can pick what they want from the forks and derivatives, and
include those improvements in the master tree.  Then all Gentoo users,
and all derivatives of Gentoo, can benefit from those improvements.

Consider the relationship between Fedora and CentOS/RHEL.  Fedora is
released rapidly, compared to RHEL.  It is where innovation and
development happen for them.  Then RHEL picks the best bits from them
and ships it in their product.  You don't have to run Fedora to be
able to use the work they produce.  (Though sometimes you have to wait
a while!)

So for one example, at Adélie we are focusing hard on the musl libc.
At some point in the future, when we have things looking good, we can
contribute that back to the official Gentoo musl overlay.  Ideally,
that would be the main Gentoo package tree... but at least the overlay.

We have also packaged some great open fonts that we've found.  We can
easily send our ebuilds to Gentoo's media team and they could put it
right in to the tree.  (Right now, I'm still working out the best ways
to use the fonts eclass... hence there is no upstreaming yet.)

Forks and derivatives allow a much wider community the ability to
experiment with the powerful Gentoo system without fear of "breaking"
the "real" Gentoo tree.  Things like my APK BINPKG_FORMAT patch may
never make it upstream, which is fine.  However, overall the goal is
to enrich the broader Gentoo userbase.

After all, isn't that the idea behind open source in the first place?
 You have the freedom to take the code, do what you want with it, and
then contribute your changes back when you're sure they're good.
Forking Gentoo allows people to try out more wide-sweeping or drastic
changes without any danger.

The future can be cool and groovy if we have the freedom to tinker :)

- --arw


- -- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org
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